


Myth

by orphan_account



Series: The Island of Discarded ADAs [2]
Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Crying, Gunshot Wounds, Hospitals, Rafael Barba Is A Lucky Stupid Man, Shot on the Courthouse Steps, a lot of crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-07 17:52:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18238268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The conclusion to the Island of Discarded ADAs that NO ONE ASKED FOR!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A little more serious and less supernatural in tone than The Island of Discarded ADAs (which was supposed to be funny I swear), but still completely unasked for ;-)

Barba wasn’t sure how long he’d been floating on his back, staring up at unfamiliar stars, wondering where exactly he _was_ , when he saw a bright light in the distance, what looked like a small ship coming towards him. He knew better than to get his hopes up. By morning, he’d surely be back on the Island of Discarded ADAs, which he was almost certain was neither off the coast of Florida nor in the Atlantic Ocean.

He remembered the not guilty verdict at the end of his trial and the immense relief that followed.

But guilt tugged at his soul nevertheless, as he recalled the letter of resignation and plane ticket receipt in his dresser drawer.

Some of it was coming to back to him, flooding into his memory as the ice-cold waves hit his ears again and again: The speech he’d rehearsed a thousand times in his head, where he planned to tell Liv that she’d changed his life, made him see a black-and-white world in color, but now that he’d broken her heart, disappointed her and everyone else who’d counted on him, he had to move on. He saw the world in too much color now not to move on, was the gist of his argument. 

The argument he never got to make.

This is what he remembered of the days before he washed up on the island. This was all he remembered. 

The lights drew closer, and hopelessness loomed near his heart, because if he wasn’t really in the Atlantic Ocean, any ship coming towards him was not coming to save him. 

_Rafa, Rafa, stay with me, stay the hell with me._

Liv’s voice, a vague memory.

A hand on his chest.

Liv whispering _I love you_ in his ear.

He couldn’t place these particular memories, if they were memories at all.

_Let me ride with him._

_I don’t know how to put this, Lieutenant, but it doesn’t look good._

_I love you, I love you_ , that was definitely Liv’s voice, but in a timbre he’d never heard before, as if she was crying.

The waves tossed him around, the water choppy because of the approaching ship, which was a personal yacht with Alex Cabot at the helm, Barba noticed as it drew closer.

“Come on, Barba,” Cabot said, throwing down a life vest from him, “it’s like being on vacation every day. Never wearing pants again takes some getting used to, but it’s better than trying to find your way through this.” 

“I’ll swim to shore,” he said.

“Rafael, you’re a smart man. There is no shore.”

“And you’re not Alex Cabot.”

“That’s arguable.”

He grabbed hold of the life vest and let Cabot pull him up on to the deck. There was nothing else in the middle of the ocean, no coastline, no hope of rescue except for the yacht that was going to take him back to the Island of Discarded ADAs. 

“I’m sorry, Rafael,” Cabot said, “I really am.”

“Don’t offer me your sympathy. I know this is my only choice.”

In the distance, he heard a wail.

Cabot didn’t react. “Did you hear that?” Barba asked.

“No.”

He recognized the sound, even though he’d never heard it before: it was the sound of Olivia Benson, sobbing.

—

“Mija, que pasó, come here, come here,” Lucia Barba said, hurrying into her son’s half-packed up bedroom to throw her arms around Benson. She lifted a hand to cradle Benson’s head and pull it towards her shoulder. “Shh, sweetheart, it’s okay.” Her attempt to soothe the lieutenant was belied by her own tears.

In her hand, Benson clutched a letter of resignation and a receipt for a plane ticket.

All week, they’d been given measures of hope that were then withdrawn and sometimes restored, every few hours, the cycle too quick, leaving everyone who loved Rafael Barba in a constant state of fear, of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The doctors at the hospital had asked Lucia to look for a living will, and Benson offered to help, her heart immediately sinking when she saw that his apartment was partially packed up. She’d justified that to herself at first, wondering if he’d been preparing for the very real possibility that he’d be found guilty of murder and sent to prison. But when she found the letter, the one that indicated that he was planning to resign from the DA’s office, together with a receipt for a plane ticket to Miami, she reflexively became furious at him. He was going to leave. He was planning to resign and skip town days after pyrrhic victory in the Householder case. 

But he’d never had the chance to leave.

On the steps outside the courthouse, Aaron Householder had pulled out a pistol and shot Barba in the chest, narrowly missing his heart.

Benson hadn’t let herself cry like this — an all-out wail — in decades, not even after she escaped from William Lewis.

Lucia pushed Benson’s hair away from her face. “They said Rafi’s brain is still working at full power, so we don’t really have anything to worry about yet.”

“His heart, they said —”

“What happens to his heart is out of our hands now.”

“Did you know he was leaving the DA’s office?”

“He was resigning, then taking a few weeks off to travel.” Lucia kissed the top of Benson’s head, and Benson allowed herself to sink deeper into the embrace. She’d never experienced these gestures of comfort from someone more than twenty years her senior before. She assumed from Barba’s occasional tales of his childhood that Lucia was almost as irrevocably flawed as Serena Benson, but the motherly embrace, the real comfort, was exactly what she needed, what she clutched at, in the moment. “I told him he was an idiot for even thinking that he had to move on from you.”

“That’s what he said, he had to move on from me?”

“Idiot.”

“Such an idiot,” Benson said through tears.

“But we love him in spite of his idiocy.”

“The names I’d have called him if he’d actually taken off. But Aaron Householder shouldn’t have taken the opportunity to make that stupid decision away from him.”

“I’m going to burn the letter in the sink,” Lucia announced.

“Why?”

“He needs health insurance, disability coverage. Jack McCoy and company don’t need to know he was going to resign.”

Benson nodded. 

“Do you want company tonight?” Lucia asked. “I can make dinner for you and your son.”

“Lucia, please, you’re going through —”

“I can’t sit at home and worry.”

“Okay. Come over.”

Lucia went to the kitchen and Benson sat at the edge of Barba’s bed, staring at the wall as her tears dried up.

—

The sound of Olivia Benson wailing filled the night sky surrounding Cabot’s yacht.

He’d just about given in, accepted the fact that he was going to be living on the Island of Discarded ADAs — whatever that meant — for eternity, or at least until some concrete decision was made somewhere about the nature of what he’d done to/for the Householders. 

As they sailed back towards the island, he heard other tears cried in private too: his mother’s, Eddie Garcia’s, Yelina Muñoz’s, Sonny Carisi’s, and although he didn’t remember, he _knew_ what must have happened.

But it was Olivia’s sobs, echoing everywhere, that made him realize how desperately he needed to get back home, back to her, and so he commandeered the yacht when Cabot let down her guard, locking her out of the steering room with heavy rope from the sails, tying the door handles together. 

For all the jokes, for all the _points proven_ to the boys in the Bronx about his Harvard-acquired hobbies, one thing was for certain: without yachts, there was no hope of escaping a tedious afterlife. 

Cabot banged on the doors, trying to break the glass as Barba steered parallel to the sun peeking up over the horizon. 

—

“He’s awake! He’s awake and he’s talking!” Lucia practically shouted at Benson, who was cleaning up the table after dinner. She had her mobile phone pressed to her ear with one hand, her other hand waving frantically in front of her face. She wrapped up her conversation with the doctor and hurried back towards the dining table to hug Benson. “I’m going to go see him. He’s off the ventilator and _talking_ , the doctor says. They’re taking him for a CAT scan.”

“Good,” Benson said, “good.” Her own optimism and relief were tempered by what had happened to Dodds three years ago, but she refused to let Lucia in on those fears, especially not now.

Before she left, Lucia kissed the top of Noah’s head and squeezed Benson’s hand. “Pray for him, all right?” she said. “He’s not out of the woods yet.”

“I know,” Benson said gently.

Lucia kissed Benson’s cheek. “He loves you, you know.”

Benson pursed her lips and tried to smile. Barba wasn’t out of the woods yet, so she wasn’t allowed to be mad at him. As soon as he recovered, as soon as he was back to his old self, she’d be furious at him. She couldn’t wait to be furious at him.

She texted her squad to let them know that Barba was awake and talking, and she knew they’d wait to celebrate too, given that they’d all been there when Dodds unexpectedly died after a seemingly successful surgery. _It’s different,_ Rollins texted her.

_How?_ she wrote back. 

_I don’t know. It has to be. He’s been fighting his way back for a week. It’s like he was desperate to come back to you._

Desperate to come back to her, sure. He had a letter of resignation and a plane ticket. He’d told his mother that he was planning to move on. 

But she couldn’t be mad at him, not yet. That was cruel and unethical and ridiculous, as Barba himself might say.

The next morning, she received a text from Lucia that said that Barba was being transferred out of ICU to a regular hospital room in the afternoon. He was asking for her, Lucia wrote.

She very nearly rolled her eyes before recalling that she’d spent much of that last week crying over him, crying over how close they all kept coming to losing him. 

Rita Calhoun breezed through at around 10, on her way out of accompanying a client to an early-morning interrogation. “I got a message from Lucia,” Rita told Benson. “Thank God that idiot pulled through.”

Benson smiled as best she could.

“Liv,” Rita said, linking arms with Benson and leading her to the back of the squadroom, “Lucia told me you found the letter-that-never-existed and the plane ticket. For the record, I tried to talk him out of it too. Asshole had a whole speech planned.”

“Rita.”

“I know, I know, “give the guy a break,” right. But I said to him, you do that, you’re going to crush Olivia, and he said he’d already let you down and I didn’t know what I was talking about.” Rita lowered her voice. “I _always_ know what I’m talking about. Tell me Householder plead guilty.”

“They were waiting to plead him out until —”

Rita closed her eyes for a split second. “Until they knew whether the charge was murder or attempted murder.” She was just as shaken up as everyone else, Benson observed, regardless of how hard she worked to hide it. “Are you seeing him today?”

“After they move him to a room.”

“I saw him a few days ago when he was on the ventilator, and he looked so helpless, not like my asshole friend Rafael at all, and I wanted to shove my high heeled shoe right through Aaron Householder’s forehead.”

“I know,” Benson said. “I will send Rafael your love, and I’ll find.out how soon before we’re allowed to be mad at him.”

“Looking forward to it.”

—

She found Barba sitting up in his hospital bed, suspiciously eyeing the small cups of pureed food set on the tray in front of him.

“Hey,” she said, taking a few more steps towards the bed, “how are you feeling, Rafa?”

He greeted her with a broad smile. “I’m so glad to see you. And I’m sorry, and, no, you don’t need to forgive me.”

“For what, getting shot in the chest?” she asked, pretending there was nothing else between them.

“Mami told me you found the letter and the —”

“There is no letter.”

“Right.” He poked at something green in one of the cups, smirking in the direction of the tray. “She told me this morning that you found the hypothetical letter and receipt, and —”

“I can’t believe she told you all that less than a day after waking up from being unconscious for a week.”

“She was upset. I told her that I heard you crying and I knew I needed to come home.”

Now she was next to the bed, her hand clutching one of the rails. “Home from where?”

“Hell,” he suggested.

“Oh, come on, Rafa.”

“Don’t feel sorry for myself, I know.”

She laid a hand on his shoulder, just above a square patch of gauze that covered the spot where they’d run a central line through his chest while he was unconscious. The wound from Aaron Householder’s bullet, she knew, was a few inches lower. “We’ll argue later about what you were planning. For now” — she dipped her head to kiss his cheek — “you need to heal.” She tapped his tray table. “At least eat the chocolate pudding.”

Barba rolled his eyes, but obliged.

“Small bites,” Benson warned.

“I’m not Noah.”

“I’ve seen three officers in my 30-year career wind up on a ventilator after getting shot. You have to wait for a speech pathologist to clear you before you can chew solid food again. This is me speaking as someone in a career where people get shot in the line of duty.”

“Sorry,” he said, switching to half-spoonfuls of chocolate pudding. “If it were up to me, I’d be home already.”

“They’re going to want you in a rehab hospital for a week. Muscle atrophy.”

“I know,” he grumbled. “Nurse already talked to me. You know me, Liv, the pinnacle of patience.”

“Rita wants to visit.”

“I’m here three more days, in the rehab hospital for a week, so she can come punch me in the head whenever she’s ready.”

Benson pulled down the rail on the side of the bed, pushed the tray out of the way, and sat with Barba. “When you recover,” she said, “you and I are going to pick a weekday, go to your place, and lay in bed all day.”

Barba raised his eyebrows.

Smiling, he took her hand in his own IV-ed and bandaged hand. “Lay in bed all day,” he repeated. 

“If it gives you a reason to work hard at physical therapy, that can mean whatever you want it to mean,” she promised. 

“There was an island,” he said.

“Hell?”

“There was an island with all the ADAs who’d left Manhattan in disgrace. Alex Cabot seemed to be in charge. That ADA who tried to frame up Captain Eames — the one you said looks like me, but I don’t see it — he was there, too.”

“As long as you realize, in retrospect, it was a dream.”

He squeezed her hand. “I heard you crying. I never want to make you cry.”

“Then why were you —” She cut herself off. “We’ll worry about that later.”

“Why was I planning to leave? You had to deal with my arrest and murder trial. I broke your heart. What kind of man lets his best friend deal with his arrest and murder trial?”

“What kind of man skips town on his alleged best friend, knowing how many people have skipped town on her before?”

“Liv.” He rolled over so he was facing her, tangling his fingers in her hair. “I know, and I regret what would have been the worst decision of my life. I love you. That’s not enough, not yet, but I love you.”

She leaned forward, pressing their foreheads together. “I love you. Almost unconditionally. Never forget that.”

Now his eyes were red. He continued to run his fingers through her hair, then leaned over and kissed her. 

“You just broke the entire DA’s office,” Benson said, maybe half-joking at best.

“Should have asked Claire Kincaid about that when I had the chance.”

“Claire Kincaid?”

“She was on the island. Couldn’t really talk that much because the ghosts only speak Latin.”

“Rafa, honey,” she said, her hand settled behind his head, “you got that from me.”

“Excuse me?”

“My mother used to say all the time that it’s important to learn Latin because if nobody speaks Latin, then who will talk to the ghosts? I must have told you that at least once.”

With tears staining his cheeks, he kissed her again, moving to cradle her face in his hands. “I’m so grateful I made it back. I’m even grateful Aaron Householder shot me, in the sense that I didn’t get the chance to leave you.” 

“Okay, stop, you and I shouldn’t be allowed to cry this much,” Benson said, not moving from her position. 

“No.” He kissed her cheek. “I don’t want you to cry.”

“These are happy tears, I think.”

“I love you, Liv. I am a stupid man, but a lucky stupid man —”

“— who yachted his way out of hell to get back to me.”

“A myth for the ages.”

“Here,” she said, dragging the tray table back and slowly rolling herself into a sitting position, “eat. I know it’s disgusting —”

“I’ve had the tasting menu at Per Se. I don’t think I can handle pureed green beans.”

“You need to get your strength back, Rafa. You and I, we have a long, joyous life ahead of us.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barba dreams of the island again. Benson comforts him. 
> 
> Now with MORE CRYING.

“She found the letter and the receipt, she realized you were going to skip town and break her heart, so you got to stay for a week.” Kevin Mulrooney shrugged one shoulder up to his ear, took an open-mouthed swallow of white wine, and pursed his lips so intently that he looked like an NYPD-detective-framing duck. “It was nice of them to let you go back so early.”

Barba clutched his tumbler of scotch and rubbed his eyes, avoiding the gaze of the disgraced ADA on the barstool next to his. “Am I dead?” he asked. “Is she grieving for me?”

“There are different scenarios.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Claire Kincaid came over with more whiskey, refilling Barba’s glass. She said something in Latin that Barba couldn’t understand, but he could hear how careful her explanation was, and he could see the wistfulness in her eyes. 

“Translate,” Barba demanded, flinging his left hand in the air near Mulrooney’s face. 

“She says the, uh, “real-life” scenario is that you died on the courthouse steps within minutes of being shot.”

“Non est in dolore,” Kincaid assured him. 

“You weren’t in —”

“I know what it means,” Barba snapped. “I wasn’t in pain. But what about my mother, my friends? What about Liv?”

“Liv is in a separate category from “friends”?” Mulrooney asked.

“Shut your mouth, Mr. Mulrooney. You don’t get to talk about Liv, not here, not ever.”

“We talk about Olivia Benson a lot here,” Mulrooney said, repeating the statement in Latin for Kincaid’s benefit. 

Kincaid shot Mulrooney what might be described as a death glare. “Scio,” she said, patting Barba’s hand, “est non aequum.”

“I don’t know how to say this in Latin, but you deserved a lot better, too, Claire.”

Mulrooney translated for Kincaid, then turned to Barba, almost as if expecting him to say that the creepy former ADA who’d served prison time for an actual, clear-cut murder (and had allegedly sawed off his victim’s genitals out of anger that a single not guilty verdict had stalled his prosecutorial career, why was Barba drinking with this guy again?) had also been done wrong.

Barba pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Quam?” Kincaid asked.

“Por que — cur — cur no soy un fantasma? Uh … espiritu?”

Mulrooney laughed. “Qui vult scire quid est non exspiravit,” he told Kincaid. Turning back to Barba: “Right? You’re asking why you’re not a ghost? Because that confuses me too.”

Kincaid shrugged in Barba’s direction.

“We all went to law school, even you, Mulrooney,” Barba said, “and Claire, tu es Harvard alum, como yo — tamquam me — so we should be able to reason this out.”

Mulrooney smirked into his wine glass. “There is no rhyme or reason to any of this.”

“Kevin!” Kincaid warned. “Nescio quid dicis illi, sed —”

“I was wrong to plan to leave Liv with a speech about her changing my life and a kiss on the cheek or the forehead. I know that now, I even felt it in the pit of my stomach then, too. I was _wrong_ , and even if I’m fated to endure cruel and unusual punishment, the people I love should not be.” He heard his own voice break at _the people I love_ , and for a split second he thought of Noah, the boy who called him Uncle Rafa, how Liv must have had to sit him down and explain what had happened. 

Noah had been through enough. So had Liv. Whatever forces decided that this should be Barba’s fate, his end, were excessively cruel. 

When the song lyric _If I leave you it doesn’t mean I love you any less_ sprang briefly to mind, Barba had to will tears back into his eyes. This was not a safe place to show weakness. But that was what he wished he could tell Liv. _If I leave you it doesn’t mean I love you any less_. I didn’t want to leave. It was out of my control. If it were up to me, I would not have left you like this, I would not have left you scared, I would not have let you see me die, I would not —

Mulrooney laid a hand on Barba’s shoulder. “Don’t touch me!” he shouted, and he had to cover his eyes with one hand, because the tears were falling regardless of how hard he tried to resist them. 

“Okay,” Mulrooney said, backing away. 

Barba’s eyes flew open into darkness.

He wanted to go home, back to Liv.

It took him a few more seconds to realize that he was in Liv’s apartment, in her bed, and she was next to him, whispering, “shh” into the space between them.

“It’s two in the morning,” she said. “You’re safe. Do you want to sit up?”

“Yes,” he said, an uncanny sense of relief washing over his body when he heard the sound of his own voice.

She helped him into a sitting position, steadying him by resting her hands on his shoulders, which were bare because the undershirts he usually slept in irritated the yet-to-be removed stitches near his ribcage and the scar tissue forming near his collarbone. Reality was setting back in. He was alive, recovering. The island was a nightmare, as it had always been.

His face crumpled and he started to cry, the same tears he’d tried so hard to resist inside the dream. “You’re safe,” she reminded him again, rubbing his back with an open hand.

The tears wouldn’t stop. Maybe it was withdrawal from the pain meds they’d had him on in the hospital, maybe it was post-traumatic stress, because even though he couldn’t remember anything following the not guilty verdict, he remembered waking up with a tube down his throat, and he _remembered_ hearing Liv wail as the yacht sailed back to the island. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I almost left you.”

“I thought we worked that out, said we’d both move on together.”

“Not that. I’m sorry I almost left you when —”

“Rafa, none of that is your fault. That’s all on Aaron Householder.”

“I started it. I put the whole thing into motion when I interfered in his family’s case.”

“Victims are not allowed to blame themselves on my watch.”

“Come on, Liv, if it was anybody else, you’d have begged the DA’s office to see the fact that someone who wasn’t a family member or a doctor flipped the switch on Householder’s son without his consent as a mitigating circumstance. You’d have begged for leniency on his behalf.”

“I don’t beg.”

A small smile formed on his lips. “You ask,” he said. “Repeatedly. Determinedly. Persistently.”

“I love you,” was her answer.

“I love you too. I’m glad I”m here to tell you that.”

“How about I get you a glass of water, and in the morning, you call Dr. Lindstrom’s office to set up an intake appointment?”

“I have so many doctors appointments coming up and —”

“I’m not letting you let this thing snowball.”

He leaned against the headboard and opened his arms to her. She hugged him, carefully resting her head near his collarbone. “Determinedly,” he said. “Persistently.”

“In a few weeks I’ll be annoying you into prosecuting impossible cases again.”

“Liv, you won’t.”

She lifted her head. “What do you mean?”

“We’ve declared our love for one another and have been sharing a bed for the last two nights. We have to disclose. We won’t be able to work together anymore.”

“Oh. That’s right.”

“And you,” he said, dipping his head to kiss her lips, “promised me a whole day in bed that can mean whatever I want it to mean.”

“As soon as you’re fully on the mend,” she reminded him. “That’s our deal. And that includes your psychological health.”

“You are persistent.”

“Always.”

She went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. Barba took a drink and set the glass on the night table, then leaned over to kiss her cheek, her jawbone, and a sensitive spot near her neck, one he’d discovered when they’d briefly canoodled on a couch in the rehab hospital a few days ago. 

“What’cha doing?” she said.

“Not sleeping.” 

“You’re recovering from a gunshot wound. I’m not fucking you to sleep.”

Barba laughed for the first time in weeks, maybe months. “I like this side of you,” he admitted.

She curled up next to him. “You really can’t sleep?”

“I’m tired, but — I keep dreaming about that stupid island, and — I have a ridiculously, not-Harvard-Law-worthy fear that I died in on the courthouse steps, and that — that’s what I meant about being sorry I left. It’s why I keep fighting to get off that island in my dreams, why I was fighting so hard to —” Tears were running down his face again, that song lyric still on the edge of his heart. “Why I must have been fighting so hard to survive.”

She scooted up on the pillow so she could pet his hair, which at this time of night was cowlicked in seventeen different directions. They were face-to-face, together. “You’re allowed to feel guilty about what you were planning to do after your trial, but you are not allowed to feel guilty that Householder shot you.” She kissed the tears off his cheeks. “Not on my watch.”

He wasn’t sure how long it would last, but for the moment, with Liv next to him, one hand in his hair and the other on his arm, he felt safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song referenced is Warren Zevon's "Keep Me In Your Heart": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMTKb-pgxGI
> 
> I'm not crying, you're crying. OK, we're all crying. 
> 
> This series will probably conclude in a casefic because I can't help myself.


End file.
